MAGA’s vision for America

What sort of America do you want? That question will not appear on fall ballots but will be there nonetheless alongside whether we continue the American experiment in democracy.

Gover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, famously hoped to return conditions in these United States to those of the late-Gilded Age McKinley administration (1897 – 1901). Upton Sinclair savaged conditions in the American meatpacking industry in “The Jungle” a few short years after McKinley.

Today’s second Gilded Age MAGA Republicans are onboard.

Indiana state Rep. Joanna King (R) this week introduced a bill that would exempt children at least 14 years of age and who have completed the eighth grade from attending school to work (with parental permission) on a farm during school hours.

Goddamnit…I told y’all.

The defunded and 4-day weeks in rural areas were purposeful. They rolled back labor laws so our kids can go to work—they are passing the laws to make it happen. https://t.co/qFeILf2KVQ

— Jess Piper (@piper4missouri) January 10, 2024

King is treading a wider path blazed last March by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas (BuzzFeed):

Under the new law, children under 16 no longer have to get permission from the state’s Division of Labor to get a job, nor will they need to have their age verified or submit things like their work schedule for a permit. In addition to no longer needing to get a work certificate, children won’t need their parents’ consent. 

Sanders’s communication director, Alexa Henning, told BuzzFeed News in an email that the permit was “an arbitrary burden on parents to get permission from the government for their child to get a job.” 

The law’s sponsor said the law was prompted not by local businesses, but by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida think tank, wrote Gene Lyons of the Chicago Sun-Times. He was less than approving:

This isn’t about the white, suburban kids Sanders gathers around her for photo ops. She recently signed a bill funneling state money to private school vouchers, surrounded by a crowd of children without a single Black or brown face in evidence, lest anybody fail to get the message.

Last year we looked into the law Iowa was passing to put more kids to work. To no one's surprise we found corporate money pushing the bill. https://t.co/zETNjvrqNp

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) January 9, 2024

To serve the economy

Led mainly by Republican legislators, at least 10 states including Iowa, Wisconsin, Ohio, Minnesota and New Hampshire have considered rolling back child labor laws, ostensibly to address labor shortages, WGBH reported in October:

“[Nationwide] we’re finding kids in automobile factories on the floor of a packing house, or some chicken processing plants and in other manufacturing facilities, in seafood, in lots of industries where we really haven’t seen children working in decades,” said David Weil, Brandeis University professor and a former administrator for the Wage and Hour Division at the U.S. Department of Labor. “And now we’re finding them in significant numbers and in very dangerous conditions, so it’s unfortunately a real return to the past.”

[…]

“We’re seeing a coordinated multi-industry push to roll back labor standards, and what that’s really reflecting is industry’s desire to maintain and expand their access to pools of low wage labor,” said Jennifer Sherer, director of the State Worker Power Initiative at the Economic Policy Institute. “And in this case doing that in a really disturbing way that can expose children to hazardous conditions or long, excessive hours that we know based on research, can put kids in a high risk category for their grades slipping.”

Let’s be clear: Democrats want an American economy that serves you. Republicans want an America in which you serve the economy.

To that end it is not enough that undereducated children be put to work in fields, factories and slaughterhouses. Women must birth more babies even if it kills them.

Evan Koch opines today in the Coeur d’Alene Press (Idaho):

This past week Sen. Chuck Winder (R-Boise) said that abortion contributes to Idaho’s workforce shortage.

Winder told the Idaho Statesman, “We complain that we don’t have enough service workers. There’s a reason, it’s not just the low birth rate. It’s the number of abortions that have occurred.” (https://bit.ly/GOPQuote)

Winder, who speaks for his party, believes women should produce more babies to create more service workers.

Idaho House Rep. Lauren Necochea has a heated exchange with a GOP colleague who implied abortion bans could remedy workforce shortages. pic.twitter.com/iwsWEEojfR

— Idaho House & Senate Democrats (@idahodlcc) January 6, 2024

Relaxing child labor laws, forced birth for addressing a shortage of “service workers,” and Lyons’ comment about bills funneling state education funds away from public schools takes me back to a persistent memory. I’ve referred to “royalists” among us who, while professing their love of America and freedom and all that, exhibit an attitude toward governance that’s more feudal than modern. Their condemnation of liberal “elites” is a bit of projection, isn’t it?

Driving the first time through a Beverly Hills neighborhood decades ago, I was suprised to see beat-up pickup trucks parked in front of so many grand homes. It took a moment to realize they belonged to groundskeepers and gardeners. Service workers.

Since then it has always seemed that the conservative attitude toward education spending has been this: How much education do waiters and gardeners need anyway?

“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” — Nebraska social worker Grace Abbott, 1938

Get a load of the latest “policy” proposals on immigration coming from Stephen Miller and the extreme white nationalists:

AS HE CAMPAIGNS on a pledge to lead an unprecedented crackdown on legal and illegal immigration, former President Donald Trump has vowed to invoke an 18th-century wartime law to help fuel his massive deportation operations. According to three people familiar with the policy deliberations, Trump, his advisers, and allies have been developing legally dubious justifications and theories to give Trump what he would ostensibly need to wield the archaic law as a weapon against the undocumented if he’s elected president again.

If Trump were to try to invoke the Alien Enemies Act for this purpose, it would almost certainly provoke court challenges, since the law is meant to target the actions of foreign governments and regimes during wartime, not alleged criminals, gangs, or non-state actors. One source familiar with the plans — a lawyer who has counseled Trump over the years — tells Rolling Stone the legal justifications under consideration by the ex-president and his associates are “very convoluted and crazy to me.”

This attorney adds, “I really don’t know how you get away with this in court.”

Still, the former president and some of his closest allies are determined to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and put these legal theories to the test, should Trump retake the White House. Trump’s public remarks on the matter have presented little detail about how, exactly, he and his government-in-waiting would circumvent the glaring legal obstacles. The three sources shed light on some of the twisted legal justifications being cooked up by Trump and his inner sanctum. 

Last year, right-wing lawyers and policy advocates repeatedly spoke directly to Trump, former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller, and others in the MAGA elite about these ideas and generally received positive feedback, the people familiar with the situation say. One of the sources read to Rolling Stone from a written memo that had been circulated in the upper ranks of Trumpland, outlining how Trump in a second term could “get this done,” the source says, stressing that this would be supposedly “all legal.”

Hitler’s deportation policies were all “legal” too. And yes, it’s all about deportation:

Invoking the Alien Enemies Act is a key component of the multi-pronged immigration and southern-border clampdown that Trump is planning. The law, first passed in 1798, grants presidents the authority to remove foreign nationals over the age of 14 from countries where the United States is either engaged in a declared war or subject to “invasion or predatory incursion” by their country of origin. 

The text of the law presents a number of problems for the would-be mass deportation plans, which opponents would likely attempt to leverage in federal court. Congress has not declared war on any country since World War II, much less on any of the Latin American countries whose citizens Trump would like to deport. Nor has any foreign country invaded the U.S. since the post-war period.  

But the sources say a second Trump administration would, for instance, argue in court that cartels, gangs, and drug dealers in Latin America have, essentially, co-opted and corrupted their governments to such a degree that the criminals represent effective state actors. Trump and his senior officials would present documents and evidence that these foreign nations — including Mexico and El Salvador — have lengthy track records of corrupt high-level government and law-enforcement officials being on the payroll of and working with drug cartels and violent criminal groups.

The administration would further claim, according to the sources, that members of cartels and gangs in the U.S. are therefore engaged in an invasion on behalf of foreign narco-states — enabling Trump to use the authorities of the Alien Enemies Act, which in text appears to apply strictly to foreign governments attacking the U.S.

By using the Alien Enemies Act, rather than existing immigration enforcement authority, a future Trump administration could “suspend the due process that normally applies to a removal proceeding,” Miller explained during a September talk-radio appearance. Once migrants are relieved of their right to due process and appeals, Trump could more easily carry out a mass deportation operation of the scale he has outlined in campaign speeches. 

Analysts don’t think it would pass legal muster. But who knows? I don’t think it’s worth taking a chance, do you?

Did you think he wouldn’t go there?

Paul Krugman makes an important point today that I’ve been dying for someone with a big perch to make about the economy. The constant media refrain that the “American public” is deeply dissatisfied with everything, especially the economy ,does not tell the whole story:

The economy is good, but Americans feel bad about it. Or do they?

The more I look into it, the more I’m convinced that much of what looks like poor public perception about the economy is actually just Republicans angry that Donald Trump isn’t still president.

Last year was a very good one for the U.S. economy. Job growth was strong, unemployment remained near a 50-year low and inflation plunged. Some reports I’ve seen suggest that this favorable combination was somehow paradoxical and contrary to economic theory. In fact, however, it’s exactly what textbook economics says to expect in an economy experiencing an improvement in its productive capacity.

[…]

Furthermore, the source of the positive supply shock is obvious: The economy finally got past the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Working out those disruptions took longer than almost anyone expected, then happened faster than almost anyone expected, but there’s no great mystery here. If some prominent economists denied that such a thing was possible, well, that’s their problem.

What is a mystery is why the improving economy hasn’t been reflected in public perceptions. There have been some fairly elaborate analyses of the divergence between economic fundamentals and consumer sentiment, but here’s a simple version:

The blue line is the economic sentiment index that has been produced for decades by the University of Michigan. The red line is the “misery index,” the sum of the unemployment rate and the inflation rate, inverted so that up means improved conditions. Until a few years ago, these two measures generally moved together. But despite an uptick in the most recent numbers (not shown), consumer sentiment remains at levels that in the past were associated with severe recessions, very high inflation or both.

As I and many others have pointed out, consumers’ behavior doesn’t match the grim answers they give pollsters: Actual consumer spending remains strong. Still, where is that negative assessment coming from?

Now, Michigan isn’t the only game in town. Another long-running survey, from the Conference Board, paints a more favorable picture, especially for perceptions of the present situation as opposed to expectations. And there’s a newer, internet-based survey, from Civiqs; I am by no means an expert on economic surveys, but Civiqs seems to be using fairly sophisticated methodology.

And their results on economic views by political affiliation look broadly in line with those found by Michigan for “current economic conditions.” The difference is that the Michigan numbers, which are based on a small sample, are very noisy, while Civiqs uses a bigger sample plus statistical wizardry to produce “smoothly trending estimates.” I wouldn’t bet my life on the Civiqs estimates, but in what follows I’m going to use them to suggest that one of the factors everyone knows is affecting consumer sentiment — partisanship — may be even more important than most economists realize. Indeed, weak consumer sentiment may be almost entirely about MAGA.

It has been obvious for a while that views of the economy have become increasingly partisan. It’s also clear that this partisanship is asymmetric: Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to say that the economy is good when their party holds the White House and bad when it doesn’t.

But the Civiqs charts show this asymmetric partisanship especially clearly. Here are their results for self-identified Republicans:

Republican assessments of the economy soared when Donald Trump took office. Even during the pandemic recession, when unemployment rose to almost 15 percent, Republicans had a more favorable view of the economy than they did in the Obama years. And when Joe Biden came in, almost all Republicans declared that the economy was bad — a view that has barely budged in the face of good macroeconomic news.

Democrats are not Republicans’ mirror image. Here’s what the Civiqs numbers look like:

If you squint hard, you might see some decline in Democratic economic optimism around the time of Trump’s election, but it’s small. Democrats did feel better about the economy after Biden won, but the economy actually was improving as we recovered from the Covid shutdown. And Democrats’ economic sentiment thereafter followed economic fundamentals, declining as inflation rose, then improving as inflation came down.

What about independents? Never mind. True independents, voters without partisan leaning, barely exist; data for independents is basically an average of voters who think like Democrats and voters who think like Republicans.

What I find most interesting about Democrats’ numbers is what we don’t see: a clear drag on sentiment from the level of prices. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence — and innumerable posts on social media — to the effect that Americans are upset about how much things cost rather than the inflation rate over the past year. But that’s not obvious from the Civiqs chart on Democrats, who are roughly as positive about the economy now as they were in Biden’s early months, before the big price increases of 2021-22.

I’m not prepared to completely dismiss the issue of the overall price level, which is backed by academic research as well as anecdotes. But as I said, it’s not obvious in the survey data.

So maybe we should at least entertain the hypothesis that the historically anomalous behavior of consumer sentiment reflects the historically anomalous nature of the modern G.O.P., two-thirds of whose supporters believe — based on no evidence — that the 2020 election was stolen. Maybe economic polling, like everything else with this crowd, is all about MAGA.

If that’s really true, the political implications are somewhat ambiguous. Poor economic sentiment may not weigh on Biden because it’s being driven by people who would never vote for him anyway. On the other hand, this interpretation suggests that most of the political upside of an improving economy may already be baked in, since Democrats have already accepted the good news, while Republicans never will.

In any case, the general point is that you just can’t interpret surveys of economic sentiment, or for that matter anything else, without taking into account the fact that the modern G.O.P. bears no resemblance to the Republican Party of past years, or for that matter any political party in modern U.S. history.

This does not surprise me in the least, neither does it surprise me that the media is happy to elide this distinction and pass on the gloom and doom as if it represents the whole country. Pundits commonly casually assert that both parties are equally partisan when it comes to objective assessments of the economy and other issues and it just is not true.

MAGA is dragging down the numbers because they worship Donald Trump and he lost. That’s what this is. And it really shouldn’t take a genius economist to say it.

"I feel that as a president you have to have immunity" — Trump pic.twitter.com/d5QswECQ4Q

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 9, 2024

“A president has to have immunity. And the other thing was, I did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong.”

The argument before the panel on the DC circuit was held this morning and it doesn’t sound like they were buying it:

Former Manhattan prosecutor Karen Agnifilo took to CNN Tuesday to discuss a moment in Trump’s presidential immunity hearing when his trial lawyers were confronted with past statements made in his impeachment hearings in January 2021.

“Clearly, Trump’s arguments in other forums are coming back to haunt him,” Agnifilo said. “You cannot be inconsistent and disingenuous when you are speaking to the court.”

Agnifilo was responding to a question from host Kaitlan Collins, who noted Trump’s impeachment lawyers said presidents could be criminally prosecuted.Skip Ad

The former prosecutor then argued that the three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit would take into account past legal forums before they ruled on the two protections Trump wants to claim.

The first being that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution and the second that a former impeachment triggers double jeopardy, the rule that says a person can’t be tried twice for a single crime.

“What I thought that the appellate court did a really excellent job here was narrowing the issues down,” Agnifilo said. “At the end Judge [Florence] Pan got Mr. [Dean John] Sauer, who represents Trump, to concede there is no absolute immunity here.”

4/ Judge Pan's devastating hypothetical shows Trump legal position is utterly unsustainable:

“You’re saying a president…could order Seal Team Six to assassinate a political rival” and could not be prosecuted, if he hadn't been impeached and convicted by Senate for those acts. pic.twitter.com/dsvJcWSGVM

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) January 9, 2024

It will go to the Supremes of course. But according to some of the brighter legal eagles, if the DC Circuit rules against Trump it’s a real possibility that they might just let it stand. Boy will Trump be mad if that happens. But they would be wise to do it.

If the high court wants to maintain even a shred of credibility, they will rule against this immunity claim. But that might make them also rule against the 14th Amendment claim. They are a political entity even if they pretend not to be.

They can say those two decisions split the difference. It won’t make anyone happy but there’s nothing they can do about that. They’re playing for history.

If you want to go deep on this, this analysis of potential timelines from Just Security is very helpful.

By the way, here’s Trump vowing revenge if he wins the election:

At midnight, hours before oral arguments on his claim of presidential immunity, Trump issues another long, rambling, deranged video where he repeatedly threatens to get his revenge on Biden if he loses his court case by indicting him if he wins election. pic.twitter.com/EzFCWUcLl3

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) January 9, 2024

Everyone who works in politics knows he and Republicans wish harm on the country under Democratic presidents, and even try to engineer it. But most reporters feel professionally obligated not to say this, so it’s helpful for to have Trump here saying it out loud. https://t.co/C82ugfiokv

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) January 9, 2024

This should be in every ad, print, digital and TV, for the next 10 months.

“When there’s a crash, I hope it’s going to be during this next 12 months because I don’t want to be Herbert Hoover. The one president, I just don’t want to be Herbert Hoover.”

Oops:

By the way:

I’ve received a remarkable number of gracious compliments on @jaredkushner's recent in-depth discussion with @lexfridman.

I personally love this clip as it reveals the determined optimist who firmly believes that there's always a solution if you're willing to try enough paths.… pic.twitter.com/ge8xt6edqR

— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) January 7, 2024

Can you believe it?

“I just think it’s just something where, if you want to accomplish something, you know, a lot of people, I hear, complain about what other people do or why it’s hard, or why it’s impossible,” Kushner said in the video. “And again, I say this as somebody who has been so blessed with so many things in life, but when I’ve had challenges or things I’ve wanted to achieve, I just focus and say, ‘What can I do?’” he added. “I’ll read everything I can get my hands on. If I fail at one thing, if the door closes, I’ll try the window. If the window closes, I’ll try the chimney. If the chimney closes, I’ll try to dig a tunnel. It’s just, if you want to accomplish something, you just have to go at it.”

In sharing the post online, Ivanka gushed over her husband, observing that she had received “a remarkable number of gracious compliments” regarding Kushner’s comments. “I personally love this clip as it reveals the determined optimist who firmly believes that there’s always a solution if you’re willing to try enough paths. I love this about Jared … and it’s a good reminder as we start the new year!” she continued.

Two Nepo Babies patting themselves on the back for their very stable genius in choosing their parents.

Sort of

Lawyers are right this minute arguing that Donald “91 felony indictments” Trump should be immune from criminal prosecution for acts he took during his White House tenure.

“Circuit judge Florence Pan is putting Trump lawyer John Sauer in a tough spot,” writes The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell.

Sauer is still arguing that Trump is not an “officer” of the U.S.

You can listen along to the arguments here.

On the SEAL Team Six scenario above, Brian Beutler takes on the argument that Trump should be held to a special standard. We all know how special he is, don’t we?

Beutler’s “We Can’t Afford Weak-Kneed Liberalism In The Trump Era” refers specifically to objections to disqualifying Trump from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment. Just to get you started:

Boiled down, the argument is this: Donald Trump should be held to a special standard, not written into the Constitution, because applying the law to him faithfully is unfair to Republicans, and may allow them to engage in tit-for-tat retribution. 

Both of these objections are easily refuted.

Consider Jonathan Chait’s most recent piece, restating his opposition to the disqualification effort, which he describes as a “gambit.”

Chait maintains his objection is political, not legal, but it is actually both—he’s making a case for the Supreme Court to invent new law to reach what he believes would be a politically expedient outcome. 

The legal aspect of his reasoning centers on standards of evidence: The allegation that Trump “engaged in insurrection” is contestable, and since Trump contests it, the public will never fully accept his disqualification. The Supreme Court should thus reverse state-level decisions disqualifying him on what are ultimately due-process grounds. 

Politics may be animating this argument, but it is an argument about the law and how it should be applied. The legal question of whether Trump’s conduct matches the meaning of “engaged in insurrection” is at the heart of all academic and judicial opinions supporting his removal from the ballot. Chait appears driven by fear of the consequences of applying the law to Trump, so he’s adopted the legal view that the 14th amendment shouldn’t be applied to Trump without the strictest possible scrutiny. That’s a legal mechanism—it just happens to be an atextual one. 

THE FAFO DOCTRINE

The unfairness point is easiest to rebut. Chait argues Trump should be held to this invented standard under the law because, “the timing and political stakes of this case require incontestable certainty.” It’d be wrong to apply the law as written (no criminal conviction required!) because it’d be unfair to Republicans. “If the Court were contemplating a Trump disqualification a year or two ago, when the Republicans had more time to organize their alternatives, it might have allowed a more forgiving threshold of truth,” he argues.

The glaring weakness here is that Republicans are real adults, making decisions for themselves, with a mix of real and fake information, and the fact that their leader engaged in insurrection and might thus be disqualified from office was not hidden from them at any point. They called it an insurrection. They acknowledged Trump’s culpability. Then they decided to reanoint him as their leader. This strikes me as Their Problem, not Our Problem.

And, oh-my-god, there is the risk of tit-for-tat by Republicans!

When playing procedural or constitutional hardball, be sure not to create new norms that sunder the whole constitutional order. Fortunately that is not a major concern here. It’s more an indication that Republican mind games are having their intended effect of making liberals doubt themselves. 

I’ve watched Democrats cringe like abused spouses since at least the GOP sweep of 1994. “But what will Republicans do?” (To us.) They pull their punches. They often don’t throw any. What if they call us bullies?

Who wants to vote for that?

Update:

What if we don’t win by being blandly palatable but rather by saying what we’re for?

An invisible consensus evaporates

The Bears, one of Adrian Belew’s bands, play a joyous set of guitar-driven songs that stick with you. Reading Jedediah Britton-Purdy’s offering in The Atlantic immediately evoked one of their most memorable: “Trust.”

The Duke Law School professor considers the breakdown in mutual trust fueling what feels like a breakdown in the democratic spirit that birthed this country, powered its resolve to form a more perfect union, and held it together, more or less, since its founding:

In 2019, 73 percent of those under 30 agreed that “most of the time, people just look out for themselves,” and almost as many said, “Most people would take advantage of you if they got the chance.”

Trust in government has taken an even greater hit. In 1964, 77 percent of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing most or all of the time. In 2022, that number was 22 percent, and it has been languishing in that neighborhood since 2010. In 1973, amid riots, domestic terrorism, the Watergate scandal, and clashes over the Vietnam War, majorities trusted Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. Majorities (in many cases substantial ones) mistrust all of those institutions now. Trust in newspapers and public schools has traveled the same trajectory.

Why is that? Britton-Purdy suggests:

Some—probably a lot—of the fracture comes from social media and, before it, the rise of partisan cable and talk radio. (There is inevitably a lot of conjecture in saying what causes what in huge, interwoven changes. Let me know if you find a large and fiercely divided democracy without social media to serve as a control in this experiment.) Some of the fracture comes from social segregation: Liberals live in liberal neighborhoods, conservatives among conservatives, and education, which sorts people into workplaces, now closely tracks politics.

“The Big Sort,” Bill Bishop named it in his 2008 book by that name. But self-segregation is a downstream effect that predates the rise of social media, a phrase that echoes the title of one of the Terminator films. Jerry Mander warned us in 1978 when he published “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” that “television is a medium of summary or reductionism – it reduces everything to slogans.” It wasn’t the programming so much as the technology itself that was hazardous to our health.

Are there no basketball coaches?

With the rise of AI, we see again another world-changing technology barreling down the tracks with little concern for its downstream cultural effects. It doesn’t help that somewhere over the past 50 years we stopped asking high school basketball coaches to teach classes in civics. But I digress.

Whatever forces ate away at the social contract undergirding our democracy, they acted while we slept, not completely unnoticed but not unchecked either, until one day we had a reality-show president, QAnon, horse dewormer, and the sacking of the U.S. Capitol. It was as if one day Americans asked, “Hey, where’d this grand canyon come from?”

Britton-Purdy injects a modicum of academic both-sidesing in analyzing the breakdown in our ability to tolerate democratic disagreement. “Trust and skepticism, if not cynicism, are two sides of a delicate balance. The goal is not some kind of harmonious community, but for citizens of an intensely diverse country to be able to coexist in a time when our problems need political solutions; not to love one another, but to get along enough to wrestle with climate change, immigration, public safety, child care, budget deficits, war—together.”

We took for granted “an invisible consensus” of trust, there until it wasn’t. But what Britton-Purdy is really talking about behind the breakdown of trust is the rise of MAGA epistemology:

Only through trust can anyone ever know much of anything. Almost all of what anyone treats as knowledge is not part of their own experience, but the upshot of a social process—reporting, teaching, research, gossip—that they have decided to trust. I don’t personally know that Antarctica exists, that my vaccine works, or how many votes were cast for each candidate in 2020, and except for Antarctica, which requires only a long journey at great expense to verify, those facts are basically impossible for me to observe. When I say I know them, I mean I trust the way they came to me. I trust those who told me, and I trust how they learned what they say they know.

This point, that most knowledge is indirect and social, might have seemed a philosopher’s conceit just a few decades ago. Yes, René Descartes pointed out that our lives might be illusions woven by an evil demon, and David Hume observed that just because bread tastes good today, that’s no guarantee it won’t poison you tomorrow. (Both examples have pretty clear applications to vaccine conspiracy theories.) But so what? The sun rose every day, the trains ran on time, and Walter Cronkite came on at 6:30.

That complacency was the privilege of an invisible consensus, in which most people’s trust was, so to speak, facing in the same direction. Those who believe Trump’s stolen-election fables or anti-vax theories are not refusing to trust: They are trusting some other mix of reporting, research, teaching, and gossip. The polls showing collapsing trust in “newspapers” or “television news” don’t really show a decline in trust; they show a fragmentation, trust displaced. But from the perspective of a democracy that relies on a common set of facts, acute fragmentation might as well be a collapse.

As perceptive observers have always understood, democracy is extremely demanding. It requires the qualities of mind and character that sustain a healthy and balanced political trust, such as the willingness to listen to others and to doubt one’s own side. It also requires the commitment to build a world of citizens, not just consumers or spectators or even protesters, but people who expect to exercise power and responsibility together.

Stealing history

I’ve been less generous. As white supremacy has eroded, those who assumed it as their American birthright have become people of the lie. Supporters of The Lost Cause lie of the Confederacy have all but died off. Monuments erected to redefine treason as heroism are being dismantled. So with Trump’s 2020 election loss, a new Lost Cause has arisen to replace it. David Blight, the Yale historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction Era recognized it before Joe Biden’s inauguration.

At Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina on Monday, Biden remarked:

We saw something on January 6th we’d never seen before, even during the Civil War. Insurrectionists waving Confederate flags inside the halls of Congress built by enslaved Americans. A mob attacked and called Black officers, Black veterans defending the nation those vile of racist names.

And yet, an extreme movement of America, the MAGA Republicans, led by a defeated President, is trying to steal history now. They tried to steal an election. Now they’re trying to steal history …

“Economic stress is an important reason that Trump might win reelection,” Britton-Purdy writes. But we survived the economic stress of the Great Depression and World War II with a sense of common purpose missing now. The world’s largest middle class has fallen behind the investor class, and those under 30 see no reason to trust the decay will reverse in time to benefit them.

Beyond 2024, it’s also a lesson that the country is set up to benefit other people who don’t care about you. Countries with lower levels of economic inequality tend to have higher levels of social trust, and individuals with less money tend to be less trusting. Rebuilding a middle-class economy is a way to buttress democratic trust.

[…]

And that old idealistic favorite, universal national service, is still worth trying to achieve. Nothing builds trust more successfully than doing important work with people who might otherwise be worrisome strangers.

And one man pulls the string
Bring down the whole damn thing

But not with a pampered, amoral narcissist — 91 felony indictments to his name, so far — injecting xenophobia directly into the MAGA bloodstream at every opportunity.

“Trust”

It’s no longer about Jesus and the Bible

There’s quite a bit of good writing about Christian Nationalism these days largely because we’re spending a tiresome amount of time in Iowa which is the heartbeat of white conservative evangelicalism. This one (gift link) from the NY Times is quite good. And this one from Benjamin Wallace Wells in the New Yorker is really excellent. They both report that today’s evangelical GOP evangelicals are different than they used to be.

Wells interviews a number of Iowa pastors and politicians and they’re all interesting. But this one really struck me:

One evening, I drove from Des Moines to Council Bluffs, on Iowa’s far-western edge and just a few miles from Omaha, to meet Joseph Hall, another pastor who had delivered the opening prayer at a recent Trump rally. Hall is forty-six years old, a military veteran who grew up in South Carolina and still has a strong Southern accent. His church looked like it was prospering. It got several hundred parishioners on Sundays, he said, and many of his sermons were online. When I asked Hall to recommend one that captured his point of view, he suggested the one he’d given in 2021, on “boldness.”

The next day, Mike Huckabee was scheduled to appear at the church. The following Tuesday, it would be Ben Carson. I had assumed that their host would be, like them, a long-standing member of the religious right, but when I met Hall he told me that he had never been very politically involved before Trump’s loss in 2020. But he was certain that Joe Biden had stolen that election, and for him that conviction tended to color everything: “If an election can be stolen, so can anything—our rights, our freedoms, our property, guns, anything.”

Hall spoke slowly and genially (at the end of our conversation, he asked me to take a selfie with him), and I realized that he was exactly who Dunwell had meant in referring to a “rising strain of Christian nationalism.” The nation, Hall explained, “was founded by men of the cloth.” He said, “The whole point of separation of church and state was never to remove the church from government; the whole purpose was to keep the government out of the church.” The DeSantis campaign was arguing to religious voters in Iowa that Trump’s opposition to fetal-heartbeat bills showed that he wasn’t really on their side. Hall told me that abortion wasn’t everything to him. “There is a bigger picture,” he said. You could tell what a threat Trump was to the secularists because of how desperate they were to beat him. “The enemy only attacks those who have potential.”

For some of Trump’s opponents—Liz Cheney, for instance—January 6th was so transformative that they obliterated previous political affiliations. Trump was at war with democracy; where did you stand? But, for some of his supporters, like Hall, those events had a similar effect in the opposite direction: January 6th had stopped political time, so everything that mattered came in its wake, and was defined by persecution. “I believe with all my heart that through the stolen election there’s been devastation, destruction—there’s been nothing good the last four years,” he said. “Everything seems to be deliberate destruction. Why open the borders? Why close the pipelines? It’s ultimately to destroy our nation and our way of life.”

It was Christmastime. There were wreaths up in Hall’s sanctuary, the caucuses just a few weeks away. Hall’s candidate, and Hall’s perspective, were on the verge of a resounding victory. “This is more than a fight between left and right, Democrats and Republicans,” Hall said. “This is good and evil. Biblically.”

Think about that. Donald Trump inspired someone to become a pastor in order to fulfill his vision. That gives me a headache.

The upshot in both articles is that we are no longer dealing with Republican evangelical Christianity as we’ve known it. There are plenty of the old guard left who eye the new guard with suspicion. But they’re following along with the new guard which is Christian Nationalist. Religion is now a means to power nothing more. The theology is incidental.

A friend pointed out to me the other day that Charlie Kirk, the young wingnut leader who runs Turning Point USA, one of the biggest far right organizations, has suddenly and quite abruptly started using Christian Right rhetoric. It’s no longer a Church thing. It’s a Trump cult thing.